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Action Express Wrestling
Action Express Wrestling (AEW) was an e-fed that operated from 2001-2012. Below are a series of interviews with former AEW Athletes. (Action Express promoted matches between 'athletes' as oppsed to 'superstars' or some other nomenclature.) _____ Okay, I’m sitting here with Phoebe Outlaw, and we’re gonna talk about AEW. How are you Feebs? Great Sarah. Okay, so tell me a story about wrestling. *Laughs* Okay. Well, I always watched WWE with my dad as a kid you know, but when I was about twelve he took me to see my first live wrestling show. I remember we piled snacks into the plane and… Plane? Oh yeah. Everybody on Kanai that can afford it has a plane. Couple of grand. Like a second car. Going overland is often literally that, so if people have far to go they fly. Do you fly? Oh yeah. I could fly before I could drive. Some kids learn to ride a bike; I learned how to fly a sea plane. Amazing. It’s a different world. Anyway, we flew up to Anchorage and watched a little house show at the Civic Center there. It was a promotion called Pacific Rim Wrestling. Now PRW was badly in the red, the talent had flown years before, and they couldn’t draw. But man, it was LIVE WRESTLING. I barely remember the show but I remember being SO excited. You know, one thing that I do remember: The Grapplers were there. Really? Yeah. Grappler One and Grappler Two. The Dragon and The Tiger. I mean, these guys were washed up a decade before I was born and later I realized how special it was to see them. As I got older it occurred to me how sad it was, that these two legends had to come all the way to a crappy Civic Center in Alaska just to make a buck. That was before I knew that Henry Asano and Yuji Kondo were millionaires. Had been for years. In STEEL mind you. Two fifty year old steel magnates just put on costumes and did little Indy shows because they still loved it. That stuck with me. What about Henry’s son? Ken? Yes, Kenji Asano. Grappler Zero. He was about fourteen at that time, so he was probably back home in Japan pulling the wings off flies between sets of crunches. Are you serious? Mostly. Anyway, I also didn’t know that seven years later a failing PRW would be purchased by Alec Haynes and renamed Action Express Wrestling. Strange coincidence. I thought so. But it’s a little planet. So, what set AEW apart from other independent feds? Lots of stuff. But the first thing that comes to mind is Alec Haynes. He was a former wrestler, so he knew the biz which is always a plus. And he came into the game knowing EXCATLY what he wanted to do. Really, when you get down to it AEW was just another regional indy, but Alec was smart. He didn’t run it like an indy. How so? Well, for one he signed guys to contracts. Stateside a lot of indies just bring guys in for one or two shows and send them off again. Alec knew you couldn’t build storylines like that, so he signed guys to long term deals. Long term for an independent anyway. Second, he was willing to spend some money. If a promoter isn’t willing to pay out for talent he’s not gonna have any and he’s gonna put on shit shows and he’s gonna go broke. Now Alec knew he wasn’t gonna lure any Dwayne Johnsons away from New York, he didn’t have that kind of money, so he went about signing the most talented and well known free agents on three continents. And third, he had an eye for it. If most of his payroll was wrapped up in the Buffalo Omura and Ken Asano and Suicide Sid set, he had to fill out his roster with cheaper guys. That meant either A - cheap vets I.E. washed up, or B - Noobs. So he went about scouting the best rookies he could and ended up giving a lot of names out there their first shot. Like you. Like me. *Smile* Beside Alec what else made AEW different? Well the territory for one. When somebody in the biz refers to a ’territory’ they don’t actually mean the land area a promotion tours. They mean the AUDIENCE in that land area. So a regional like ECW out of Philly, I mean… Within the radius of a five hour car ride from Philadelphia you have one of the densest population centers on Earth. So while the actual land area was small, the AUDIENCE was very large. Same with Steve Avery’s Lone Star Wrestling. I’d like to talk about LSW for a minute. Sure, but nobody EVER called it LSW. It was just ’Lone Star’. Ah. Well, you were briefly employed there correct? Yeah. After AEW. Desperation by Steve I think. By that time he was floundering. Tell me. Well, just like ECW Lone Star had it made, okay? Texas region, everything you could want. Great talent base, for one. For another, wrestling is a HUGE draw in Texas, bigger than the North East even, and every type of venue you could want. Four MAJOR markets in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. A dozen or so mid-sized venues in Lubbock, Amarillo, El Paso, whatever, and what? Three thousand small towns? Just within the political borders of the State of Texas you could easily sustain a solid indy and MAKE MONEY TOO. Hell, maybe more than one. Frankly you’d have to be an idiot to fuck up wrestling in Texas. So what happened? Steve Avery is an idiot. Correction: Steve Avery was a GREEDY idiot. He had Vinnie Mac dreams. He wasn’t happy with the ’m’ in millionaire. He wanted that ’b’. So he pushed too hard too fast. Expanding to Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Northern Mexico is one thing but… That guy just couldn’t understand that people in Los Angeles and Miami wouldn’t come watch something called ’Lone Star Wrestling’. Big Texas flag on the logo and everything. He didn’t evolve; and he died. Same story with eighty percent of the dead feds out there. Eighty percent? The other twenty percent is money. If the owner isn’t stupid or greedy then they just go broke. It takes MONEY to create a watchable and promotable product. You gotta rent the venues, you gotta pay the work, you gotta sell the show. Money. If you don’t have enough you end up like Paul Heyman. Great product, great talent, great promotion: DEAD. A million reasons why you can go broke, but the common theme is feds cost money. They FEED on it. If you can’t make it or don’t have it, they starve. Let’s talk about AEW’s ’territory’, or as you put it, ’audience.’ Oh yeah. Well, the niche that that Kiwi lunatic Alec Haynes bought into was like the fed he bought; the Pacific Rim. Now he moved the feds headquarters from Sapporo to Christchurch, but the audience was the same. Now if you’re touring and you go from Allentown to Harrisburg, well, no big deal. But if your touring and you go from Darwin to Taipei… See that was the main difference between AEW and other feds. Because of the REGION we had to tour HUGE distances to find that audience. It wasn’t Waco to College Station, okay? It was Asia to North America. But that was the audience! So we racked up ALL the frequent flyer miles. It’s a miracle you never read about AEW wrestlers eating each other to survive in a life raft. I LIVED on a fucking airplane. But that was part of the deal. Alec was sort of ahead of his time, see he didn’t do dark stuff. No house shows. Everything we did was on TV. This helped to draw those free agents too, by the way. So maybe we have to make a twelve hour flight from Santiago in Chile to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. It sucked, but once you got there you were gonna be on TELEVISION. Much different than a twelve hour drive from Charlotte to Sarasota to wrestle in front of sixty people at the county fair, you know? TV! That sold us on the whole thing. And it made AEW very successful. How did Alec get TV deals so early on? He was a talker. It was his best skill as a wrestler and his best skill as a promoter. He sold a hundred different TV stations on AEW before he’d even signed a wrestler. He sold them in Spanish in South America, in English in North America, in Japanese, in Chinese, in Malay, and English again in Australia. And he spoke the languages! He’s the only man I ever met that spoke French but hated France. He really was a genius. But once he had the deals in place, he knew he could sell AEW to any indy douche on Earth. “Tired of wrestling for a hundred bucks a pop in Boise and Billings and Sioux City? Come to AEW and I’ll increase your pay by FACTORS, AND you fly first class instead of driving a Buick.” He signed anybody he wanted. And he wanted only the best. And that’s what he got. What was it like, working in AEW? Awesome. And I mean the schedule. Look, our Winter Schedule ran from the last week of June to the first week of September, we all stayed in Christchurch doing TV. Just filming card after card, right? We do promos, we do a card, we do promos, we do a card. Sure. Well, Alec didn’t pull the old WCW trick and squeeze in three months worth of wrestling into two weeks. Our pace in AEW was just too frenetic, the stuff just too violent. We needed time. That’s why AEW shows only ran an hour. We wrestled twice a week, with a little overlap, that nobody ever minded. We had time to heal and time to train. He took care of us. Not because he was a human being, because he wasn’t, but because he knew that hurt and exhausted wrestlers put on shit matches. Lucky for all of us, the roster was so tight that even when Ken or Sid was laid-up, the other guys picked up the slack. I challenge you to find a bad Action Express card. What about after TV? Winter Vacation. Well, Winter down there, Summer here on Earth. We had nothing to do while all those shows aired. We would do twenty weeks of shows in ten; so the other ten? Have fun. Vacation. We bought our own booze but Alec bought the tickets to send us anywhere. Ten weeks of straight vacay. Can you imagine now?! I’d go home for two weeks, hunt and fish; meet the girls in Hawaii for two more… and I’d still have six weeks left! It was great. We were happy and happy wrestlers put on better matches. Ten solid weeks of vacation. Wrap your head around that. Sounds nice. Sounds unreal! But that was Alec. We put our LIVES out there for him, and he knew it, because he’d done it himself. And unlike the skells that he and WE had worked for, he took care of us. Of course, then the vacation ended. How so? Tour time. Second week of September. We did the tour. And like I said before it isn’t a long car ride. You wanna shoot between two medium sized cities in Texas? Three, four hours in a rental car, tops. Two medium sized cities on the Rim? Ten hours in the air over hostile water, plus the three flight changes. It was brutal. But we had the advantage of being the best show in town wherever we went, so that lessened the sting. Motherfuckers in Lima, Peru had never seen anything like us. And neither had motherfuckers in Vancouver or Seattle or Hokkaido or Guam, or anywhere. I bet motherfuckers in New York City had never seen anything like us. You guys were good? Pound for pound? Action Express Wrestling was the best show going on planet Earth. I’d bet my teeth on that. ______